Disabling ASR on a Windows Server

ASR stands for automatic server recovery. It's a service whereby the iLO features of a HP server will reboot it, should it detect that something has gone wrong with the operating system. Good idea, except when the detected failure isn't really a failure. Or you want to be able to troubleshoot the problem while it's occurring.
The most straightforward method for changing this setting is to boot the server into the BIOS setup (F9) screen, and browse to Server Availability –> ASR Status.
Sometimes, you’d like to make this change without downtime, however. It appears it’s possible. Unfortunately, it also appears that a reboot, at some point, still is necessary.

Disabling ASR on-the-fly requires a couple of things: an installation, and a configuration change.

The installation that's necessary is net-snmp, a set of snmp tools. They can be got here: http://www.net-snmp.org/ It's an install, rather than a set of standalone tools, but you can (and should) opt not to install the trap and snmp services.
Once that's installed, double-click on the SNMP Service on the target server. You should see something like the screen shot below:

In order to change the ASR setting, the appropriate community (name changed here to ‘community’) needs read/write access. So edit that line and change that setting. A restart of the service is necessary for this change to take effect.
Once you've made that change, you can use the snmpget and snmpset commands to disable ASR.
To read the current setting for ASR, run snmpget:

C:\>snmpget -c community -v 1 localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.232.6.2.5.1.0
SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.232.6.2.5.1.0 = INTEGER: 4

Three is disabled. Four is enabled. So we can see that ASR is enabled on the system above. Let's change that.

C:\>snmpset -c community -v 1 localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.232.6.2.5.1.0 i 3
SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.232.6.2.5.1.0 = INTEGER: 3

And now we can double-check our setting:

C:\>snmpget -c community -v 1 localhost .1.3.6.1.4.1.232.6.2.5.1.0
SNMPv2-SMI::enterprises.232.6.2.5.1.0 = INTEGER: 3

It does appear that a reboot is necessary for this change to take effect, though (HP System Management Homepage still reports ASM as enabled after this change). That’s unfortunate, and if anyone has a notion if this will take effect without a reboot, it’d be great to hear about that.